be enterprising in process

Accelerating product innovationPredicting demand

Delivering the perfect orderOptimising your assets

Conquering process challenges

It’s not every day that a proven end-to-end software solution isborn. It’s even less frequent that such a solution is tailored to fitthe needs of the broad swathe of the process industries. And it’sfrankly unheard of that its scope should encompass everythingfrom product concept to consumer. Yet that’s exactly what Inforhas done in launching its Process Essentials.

Building on the organisation’s acquired pedigree of systemsand its experience with 3,500 customers around the world –including British Sugar, G Costa, HJ Heinz, Cray Valley, Big Bear,S&A Foods, Cadbury Schweppes and Evans Vanodine – Infor hascreated something that very few have attempted and none hadachieved, until now. This relatively young, but historically rich,software giant has integrated its process-centric applications sothat they now span recipe and formulation development andmanagement, new product development and introduction,supply chain and production planning, scheduling andoptimisation, operations and quality management, tracking andcompliance, plant maintenance and order fulfilment.

You’re looking at the most wide-ranging suite ever built forthe process sector, able to handle just about all of today’srequirements, particularly in food and beverage, CPG,pharmaceutical and specialty chemicals manufacturing.

It couldn’t have come at a better time. As Mike Spragg, UKdirector for the process industries, says: “Process companiesare under more intense pressure than ever in terms of costs,margins and on-time deliveries – not helped by fluctuatingsupply and demand and the power of the big retailers calling the

tune. These days, for example, if a single supplier lets themdown, or a plant unit fails, they need to act very fast.”

Then there’s today’s aggressive regulatory regime: localmaterials provenance and usage restrictions, food labelling andaudit trails of ingredients, formulations, production andpackaging for 21 CRF 11, allergens, REACH and environmentalcompliance – and for handling product recalls – all demand tightdata capture and better, faster procedures, processes andreporting. And on top of all that is relentless global competition.

All of which means that brand owners and plant managersneed new ways to maximise the effectiveness of productdevelopment at one end, and promotional campaigns at theother – while cutting costs throughout. It’s about acting smarter,collaborating better across departments and systems and, asSpragg puts it: “Getting a new level of insight so that the entireenterprise is on the same page, able to see the consequences ofevents and make decisions quickly.”

Which is precisely what Process Essentials delivers. Itincludes modules for ERP, PLM (product lifecycle management),SCM (supply chain management) and EAM (enterprise assetmanagement), all tightly integrated.

Four solutions in oneImportantly, each package was developed specifically to dealwith issues unique to process. For example, ERP recognisesinverted BoMs (bills of materials) and manufacturing to bulk butpacking to different sizes; it handles shelf life, yield- and quality-based blending and intermediates; and it looks after tankmanagement, labelling, compliance management and reporting,as well as true costing and simulation.

So the benefits: you gain unprecedented visibility, and youcan run to a new level of agile, demand-driven operations all theway from product concept to packing, irrespective of regionalissues, promotions, currency, language and time. What’s more,you can do that while reducing the cost of servicing customers.

Also, because the applications are integrated, keeping insync during upgrades isn’t a problem. Most importantly, Inforinsists that you can start small and develop piecemeal, runningexisting software where necessary, but filling in the gaps whileensuring a rock solid roadmap for the future.

Rory Granros, Infor’s global director of industry and productmarketing for process, puts it thus: “Infor Process Essentials isone of the most comprehensive and integrated suites availablefor process manufacturers. We have been active in this marketfor many years, and this expertise has put us years ahead.”

And Spragg concludes: “This is the only collection of process-specific modules from a single software vendor anywhere in theworld. We’re offering very specific, best of breed functionalityintegrated into one system that can change the way processusers think and do things.” ■

Process Essentials: new expectations

Foreword

2 Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk

In launching Process Essentials,Infor is delivering an end-to-endsolution for the process sectorthat will transform expectations

If you’re in the process industries, you’re likely to have a veryspecific, but wide-ranging wish list for your ERP environment.One that has never been met by a single software vendor.

That list will almost certainly include: lot-tracked and non-lot-tracked materials; lot genealogy for ‘used-in’ and ‘made-from’tracking; formula management with units of measureconversions; formula balancing and ingredient substitutions,with by-products and co-products; pack BoMs (bills of material)with nesting; and integrated quality management with trackingof test results against purchased and manufactured lots.

Beyond these, you will also want support for: 21 CRF 11;controlled materials; country of origin ingredients labelling(COOL); catch weight with quality test results inherited frommaster lot, plus sub-lot overrides; dynamic weights andmeasures with activity control and dry weight at item and lotlevel; lot and sub-lot management covering capability andgenealogy; process variability and variance reporting; tankmanagement with lot blending and cost averaging; and actualcost tracking to lot level with post-transaction adjustments.

Built for process usersAnd that’s not all. Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want thesystem to recognise market- and commodity-based pricing,promotional pricing, deductions and trade funds – and have thatintegrated with accounts receivable? And what about: supplierand customer pricing at normal or actual weight; allocationprocessing for FIFO, LIFO or FEFO rules; and processmanagement by formula, routing, effectivity date, and costing?

You have just specified Infor’s Adage – the firm’s updated,entirely process-centric ERP system, developed over the yearswith food and beverage, CPG, pharmaceutical and chemicalsmanufacturers around the world. This is now the backbone ofInfor’s new end-to-end Process Essentials solution, which alsointegrates software for supply chain planning and scheduling,demand and inventory management, PLM (product lifecyclemanagement) and EAM (enterprise asset management).

Sounds convincing? Best to hear just how good it is from alive user, such as California-based dehydrated potato productsmanufacturer Basic American Foods – which also implementedProcess Essentials supply chain planning and optimisation.

“We felt Infor was the only supplier that really understoodthe full scope of our industry’s planning challenges,” says BAF’smanager of business technology development. “The true object-orientated design of Infor’s solutions goes further than any

other software package I am aware of,” he adds, “and this isreflected in the excellent user interface and in the flexibility ofthe supply chain modelling.”

Most important, BAF is using the system to generate cost-optimised production plans – automatically trading-offinventory, raw material and production costs, and delivering aplan that is both feasible and cost effective. That meansrecognising constraints ranging from workforce to energy,logistics and storage at each of the company’s sites. “BeforeInfor Advanced Planner, we were not able to accurately evaluateproduction cost scenarios across the enterprise,” says our man.“Now we can accurately evaluate cost trade-offs. Because Inforsolutions thoroughly evaluate production alternatives, we wereable to avoid spending several million dollars by mistakenlychoosing a less appropriate scenario.”

Mike Spragg, UK director for the process industries, makesthe point that for BAF, one of the key issues is producing

consistent products from variable materials, cost effectivelyacross multiple plant units, while responding to fluctuatingdemand and making the best of opportunities as they arise. “Atthe top level, key ingredients in Infor ERP enable you to includean extended enterprise view, with precise planning capabilityand streamlined, flexible production management,” he says.

And it doesn’t stop there. “At the detail level, you get invertedBoMs and, for example, the capability to manufacture to bulkand assemble to different pack sizes. Also, throughout thesystem there’s granularity of information down to sub lot levelso you can trace materials in both directions, and you get veryprecise specification matching and actual costing,” says Spragg.

This is process ERP with a very big difference. Theexpression ‘soup to nuts’ isn’t new, but in Process Essentials itseems uniquely applicable. ■

ERP built for process manufacturers

ERP

Everything you always wanted inan ERP system for process, butnever dared to ask for? That’sInfor’s Process Essentials

Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk 3

It’s not just in production that the process sector looks sodifferent to discrete manufacturing. Supply chain planning andscheduling are notoriously complex, due to factors such as thevariability of ingredients and intermediates, process yieldvariances, shelf life considerations, tank and vessel capacityconstraints and batch sequencing issues. And so are demandand inventory replenishment management, not least because ofthe industry’s emphasis on campaigns and relatively rapidproduct lifecycles.

Andrew Kinder, Infor’s director of product marketing forsupply chain management, makes the point that, as a result,process users need specific process systems. “Everyonerealises that baking a cookie is very different to manufacturingthe oven the cookie is baked in. But it’s more than just thedifferences between mixing ingredients and assemblingcomponents. There are lot traceability, yield losses, evaporationand volume- and flow rate-based capacity limits of tanks, silosand pipelines to consider as well.”

And there’s more: long range planning and short-termscheduling can be extremely complex, yet the success of theirmanagement determines profitability. “What about demand

planning? That’s different too,” says Kinder. “Heinz and Cussons,for example, have to be extremely promotionally-orientated –and they must be able to react to competitors’ offers as well.”The upshot: process users are likely to need sophisticatedalgorithms that can forecast the supply chain implications ofhundreds, or potentially thousands, of product categories at theplant, location and account levels, recognising multiplebusiness and plant constraints, as well as demand parameters.

On top of that, there’s a requirement for tight collaborationwith the teams working with new products and phase-outs. Andon top of that there are warehousing and distributionrequirements, with systems needing to factor in differentcontainers and capacities, refrigeration and ambient storageand transportation, product types that have to be separated...The list goes on.

Infor’s answer is a complete supply chain suite that spansdemand, inventory replenishment and production planning,scheduling and optimisation, as well as warehousing andtransportation. It looks like the best of both worlds – deepprocess functionality from the company’s proven processsystem acquisitions, combined with significant investment innew technologies for today’s savvy users. For example, Infor’sdemand planning has been totally re-engineered in Java totransform its ability to scale and integrate with Infor and non-Infor business systems.

‘Out of the box’ solutionLooking in some detail, Infor Advanced Planner can beconfigured to handle any combination of production capacities,distribution routes, material availability and labour resources –assessing any permutations, trade-offs and constraints, anddelivering an optimal plan for the whole supply chain, not justpart of it. Kinder says the system can be tuned to plan acrossmultiple sites, and to balance product mix capability withprofitability, consider shelf life constraints in build-aheadstrategies, and choose the optimal product recipe or formulabased on material and plant availability versus demand.

He outlines its key strengths as: “a multiple constraint-based planning engine with in-memory solver for speed andresponsiveness; user-definable constraints covering productioncapacities, transport and capacities, labour and skills andalternative sourcing options; multiple solving strategies such asmaximising service level fulfilment and/or throughput, orminimising total operational supply chain costs; and ‘what if’simulation capabilities and comparisons.

Meanwhile, Infor Advanced Scheduler for Process is similarlyall-encompassing, but deals with short term productionhorizons – balancing, for example, the requirement for smooth,efficient and low cost production runs against the inevitableneed to manage volatile customer demand with minimum costand disruption. Again, it takes into account the real world ofprocess manufacturing, with key attributes including thesystem’s ability to model and handle plant constraints anddependencies, as well as batch and continuous flow processing,

production sequencing trade-offs and shelf life issues. Fast-moving pre-packaged ready meals manufacturer S&A

Foods, which supplies short shelf life products to large retail andfood service companies, provides an excellent example of bothmain systems in action. Its manufacturing process consists oftwo main stages, each involving a range of plant. First, readymeal components are cooked and chilled; then the finishedproducts, with different component combinations, are filled andpacked. Most components are used in multiple products andboth stages have capacity constraints, so optimising productionplanning and scheduling was a challenge.

Serious sequencing problemsWith an ageing bespoke system, the company says that, whileplanning preparation of the components and filling lines wasfeasible, sequencing the two stages was a problem, resulting inwaiting times and non-optimal production in the filling areas.Other difficulties were the common ones of short shelf life,volatile demand and short order lead times. Most of which wasmanageable until the company experienced more rapid growthand decided to outsource storage and finished products pickingto a third party, further complicating its shelf life and finishedgoods inventory planning.

S&A Foods went for Infor’s Advanced Planner and AdvancedScheduler solutions to turn the situation around – partly, it says,because it was the only solution to offer the requiredcapabilities, and partly because of Infor’s ability to integratewith S&A’s existing BPCS ERP system (now one of Infor’sacquired solutions).

The company now uses Infor Advanced Scheduler mainly tocreate short-term plans by running a model that produces dailyfinished goods and cook plans simultaneously, taking intoaccount capacity constraints of the cook vessels and fillinglines. The solution builds its plans based on stock holdingparameters and finished goods’ shelf life. It also handlescapacity management on a slightly longer horizon, runningweekly and providing for an eight-week horizon.

Infor’s Advanced Planner is then used for long-term capacitymanagement – planning in weekly buckets, with a horizon toone year. S&A makes the point that it constantly introduces newproducts and improves existing ones, so it needs to assess theirimpact on detailed production capacity. By using the newsystem as its S&OP (sales and operations planning) tool, S&Asays that process is now relatively easy, and that the solution isalso flexible enough to allow for future developments.

Says Paul Howell, S&A Foods supply chain manager: “Theintroduction of Infor Advanced Planner and Advanced Schedulerinto the business has been invaluable in allowing us to unlockthe potential for the site. Both packages have already providedus with a strong advantage over our competitors. We believethat they will continue to add value to our business as thesupply chain team continues to work with them and furtherenhance their functionality.”

How? In particular, by integrating all aspects of its supply

chain, the systems have transformed S&A’s visibility of itsproduction plans from end-to-end. The company can nowaccurately capacity plan all equipment and smooth itsproduction, harnessing finished goods stocks, while reducingwaste and improving customer service, fully taking into accountuse-by dates. It also says it has improved its understanding ofthe complex relationships between its kitchen and filling areas –and thus the true capacity for the site – and that the newsolution responds so rapidly to demand changes that revisedschedules are now ready before daily production starts.

Indeed, by implementing the solutions, the companybelieves it has set a benchmark internally for how systems andbusiness change projects should be resourced and managed.Moreover, on top of the business benefits already achieved, S&AFoods expects further benefits, for example, by introducing ‘asnear as possible’ real time production reporting from its MES(manufacturing execution system) to drive even further benefit.

Summing up, Kinder observes: “There are two key pointshere. One is that Process Essentials is the only solution with thebreadth to address all of the process industries’ supply chainand demand and inventory replenishment managementrequirements, with planning and scheduling right throughproduction and into warehousing and transportation – with orwithout an Infor-based ERP.

“The second is that this is the only solution with the depth offunctionality to recognise, for example, the different planningand scheduling needs of the different process types. And theproof of this is that we can, and do, recommend differentplanning solutions for other industries. No ‘one size fits all’works in process manufacturing.” ■

Planning and scheduling the process way

SCM

4 Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk 5

Food and beverage, CPG, pharmaceutical and specialitychemicals companies have complex supply chain requirements – and Infor’s solutions are set to deliver

Nowhere are the pressures of global competition and regulationfelt more keenly than in the process industries – and especiallyin product development. It’s no secret that to survive,companies in the food and beverage, CPG, pharmaceutical andspecialty chemicals sectors must develop new and enhanced,profitable products faster and more efficiently than ever before.

And they must do so while simultaneously focusing oncompliance, cost reduction and their supply chains at everystage. Doing that well is about right first time, holistic thinking,all the way from design. And that requires a master database,enforcing rigorous change management, but importantly, alsointegrating all departments via an overarching PLM (productlifecycle management) process, from finance to distribution.

That’s where Infor PLM Optiva comes in, providing the best ofall worlds. It’s proven: we’re talking about a PLM system with aheritage of more than 10,000 users across 40-plus countries incompanies such as Campina, Coca-cola, Campbell’s Soup, GEPlastics, Hormel Foods and Yves Rocher. But it’s also new – nowan integral component of Infor’s Process Essentials end-to-endprocess-specific solution.

The system seamlessly integrates formula, material, label,packaging and specification management, as well as testing andconstraint-based validation, providing users with a singleresource to manage all the separate, yet interdependentaspects of new product development, introduction, marketing,production, distribution and eventual phase-out. Existing usersclaim benefits ranging from 50% improvement in R&D

productivity to 30% increase in new products, 70% reduction inproduct specification development time and 85% savings onlabelling costs. They also cite: 30% reduction in redundantpackaging variants, 20% reduction in redundant formulas and45% reduction in direct materials.

These are massive improvements and Maarten Hagen, InforPLM business consultant, says they stem from the system’sability not just to manage very significant amounts of productdata and documentation across functions, departments andsites, but to provide visibility into processes right out tomanufacturing, with supply chain-wide data sharing andcollaboration – plus validation and compliance built in.

“Infor PLM Optiva works so well because it increases theavailability of knowledge and enhances and automatesworkflows, wherever they’re needed,” he says. “It provides asingle source of truth for all products that’s data-driven, and itsupports the whole process form concept to commercialisation.And that’s out of the box: it can be configured and implementedfor any process business, no matter how large, without coding.”

Food for thoughtGeerje Verhoeff, international application manager for Optiva atNetherlands-based dairy products manufacturer Campina, saysthe value comes from Optiva’s centralised data centre. She saysthat Optiva led to better information accuracy, quicker access toinformation, greater understanding of product lifecycles, andthe means to manage them – both proactively, anticipatingdemand, and reactively, dealing with issues as they arise.

She cites the data search and manipulation tools, which areso powerful, she says, that Campina can do things in timescalesof a completely different order. “Imagine that we had to respondto a market situation where it would be helpful to haveinformation about the sugar percent levels across a productrange,” says Verhoeff. “Before Infor PLM Optiva, this might take acouple of weeks, depending on the number of sites that heldrelevant information, and how quickly it could be accessed andcollated. Now we’d have that information in under 30 minutes.”

And she says that the improvements are just as profoundelsewhere – for example in purchasing, which can nowinvestigate reducing the amount of a specific ingredient, orequally, rapidly see the consequences of material shortages.

Hagen agrees, adding that Optiva users also benefit frombeing able to assess their exposure to regulatory issues – forexample on a GMO question over an ingredient, packaging,carbon tax or recyclables – in a matter of minutes. “And at theother end of the process, Optiva enables users to check thatproducts in development are suited to their production sites,” hesays. “The point is, with Infor PLM Optiva they can manage theirbusinesses proactively – boosting the bottom line, sustaininggrowth and strengthening their competitiveness.” ■

Power of product data

PLM

6 Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk

PLM software has a central andvery special significance for manufacturers rooted in theprocess industries

Unlike most other factors that can drag down a manufacturer’sprofitability, asset effectiveness is often not top of mind. Andthe same goes for maintenance management and sparespurchasing and inventory controls. Why? Partly because themost common response to pressure on margins is to focus onsales growth and cost-cutting. And partly because maintenancemanagement systems have hitherto been largely inaccessible,run as separate systems exclusively for engineering.

In today’s ultra-competitive, asset-intensive processindustries that just doesn’t make sense. Underperformingassets and associated departments have far-reaching, andinvariably negative, consequences for corporate health. Not onlycan asset downtime disrupt production, reduce effective plantcapacity and risk quality, safety and compliance KPIs; it’s alsoone of the surest routes to scoring lower customer ratings.

Additionally, inadequate maintenance can increase the costof keeping assets and equipment running at the peak efficiencymanufacturers’ capacity calculations assume – and force theminto entirely avoidable spending on replacement plant.

Massive installed baseMarty Osborn, senior director industry product marketing forInfor EAM (enterprise asset management), insists that in theprocess industries there is neither need nor excuse for theseoutcomes. “Infor EAM is now running maintenance at more than10,000 organisations around the world, helping them to bettermanage, maintain and track their assets, as well as drivingbetter decision-making in maintenance, inventory, uptime, riskmanagement and strategic planning,” he says.

What’s more, it’s now an integral part of Infor’s end-to-endProcess Essentials, dedicated to the process industries andfully integrated into its process-centric ERP, supply chainmanagement and product lifecycle management systems.Osborn: “In the past, process manufacturers have had twooptions – big monolithic applications driven from finance andERP, or best of breed systems that had to be bolted on andsupported. With Infor EAM we offer best of breed functionalityon any platform, from our heritage in asset management, butit’s tightly integrated into the whole solution.”

“And that’s right down to supplier and cost codes beingsynchronised between ERP and EAM, as well as MRO[maintenance repair and overhaul] components being reflectedautomatically in the purchasing loop,” adds Nick Garnett, InforEAM account manager. “So all information about resources,

materials and procurement processes is held in one place – andthe traditional gap between engineers wanting to use ERP torequest materials, while finance wants commitment againstPOs, budgets and contracts, becomes a thing of the past.”

Which is good to know. But Garnett says there are also otherkey aspects of Infor EAM that make it so able to respond totoday’s challenges. “It enables companies to identify, track,locate and analyse their physical assets. By compiling assetdata, such as location, cost history, permits and documents, italso helps maximise productivity and asset life.” And that levelof functionality applies to everything in MRO. What’s more, thesolution supports calibration, mobile working and asset barcodemanagement, with scorecards and KPIs built in.

The latter was one of the keys for Walkers Snack Foods,which had historically been operating each of its sites withseparate engineering managers and different methods andsystems for managing engineering stores, purchasing and

maintenance. It needed to establish consistent measures andKPIs in order to find and spread best maintenance practice.

Walkers went for Infor EAM (then Datastream). The companyimplemented a centralised system and set up rigorousprocesses for KPIs and balanced scorecards, which it quicklyadopted across the sites, enabling it to investigate its variousmaintenance operations and develop the uniform best practices– and cost savings – it wanted.

Says Walkers’ engineering support manager Paul Townsend:“We now have all five sites sharing the same system, databaseand working practices. The visibility of the information isrevolutionising the management of our MRO functions. We haveover 22,000 inventory items and 8,000 equipment itemstracked, and for the first time we are really managing both ourassets and our suppliers.” ■

Power of plant in process

EAM

Putting plant health higher upthe agenda pays dividends inspades – and the way forward istightly integrated EAM systems

Infor Process Essentials www.infor.co.uk 7

because enterprising softwareis watching the vine.

An enterprising wine business won’t lose sight of the grape

With more than 3,500 customers in the process manufacturing industries, Infor Process Essentials represents an industry-leading customer base

‘No one else has this combination of capabilities’ AMR.

Infor has supported the needs of process manufacturers for over 30 years with an integrated, business-specific solution with industry experience

built in, which lowers our customers’ total cost of ownership.

Infor Process Essentials

Call us at +0 800 376 9633 to find out more or go to www.infor.co.uk/process

Copyright © 2007 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All rights reserved. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. www.infor.com.

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